The Letters (29 page)

Delia was stunned. Never, in her wildest dreams, could she have imagined such a conversation. Never.

“I don’t know when you’re planning to return home—”

Delia stepped in quickly. “I don’t know that, either.”

“Maybe, if it would be all right with you, I could come out and visit you. We could go out to dinner and just . . . talk. Would that be acceptable?”

She smiled. “Entirely acceptable.” They were a long, long way from reconciling, from becoming a family again. But it was a step in the right direction. Then something occurred to her, out of the blue. “Before you go, could I ask you to pay a house call on Rose’s mother-in-law?”

Outside, rain fell softly, nourishing Rose’s recently planted strawberries in the dark, wet garden earth. She hardly noticed.
Vera was having a bad spell, and when a knock came on the door, it startled Rose. When she opened it, there was Delia, looking pleased, with a man by her side. A fine-looking man. Her husband.

“Rose, this is Charles. I thought it might be a good idea if Charles were to meet Vera.”

Rose stepped onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind her. Charles put his hand out to shake Rose’s. She looked down at his hand before taking it, then she didn’t release it.

“It’s not a good night for visitors.” Rose lowered her voice. “Vera’s having a bad night.”

“That’s why I wanted Charles to meet her,” Delia said. “As a doctor.”

Rose turned and opened the door and let them both into the kitchen. Vera sat in a chair, hiccupping, tears streaming down her face in misery.

Charles turned to Rose. “Has she had medical attention?”

“Yes, of course. The doctor said she was having mini-strokes.”

“What medication is she on?

“Coumadin.”

“Does she get episodes of singultus very often?”

Rose looked at him. “Single-what?”

“Swallowing disturbances,” he said.

“Hiccups,” Delia clarified. “And yes, she does.”

Rose nodded. “More and more. For longer and longer stretches. And the weakness in her right side is spreading.”

Charles crouched down by Vera and tried to straighten out her right hand. “Do you have a tingling sensation in your hand?”

She nodded.

“Dizziness? Headaches?”

“Some.”

Charles patted Vera’s hand reassuringly in a way that was touching to Rose. From the way Delia had described him, she would have assumed he was a stern man, but here he was, tender and kind, to a complete stranger. “I’d like you to get an MRI to help pinpoint the problem.”

“What’s that?” Vera asked.

“Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It’s a technique used to take pictures of soft tissues in the body.”

“But why?”

“Strokes can be misdiagnosed. There are many other things that share symptoms of strokes, but they aren’t strokes.” It seemed like a stone had fallen into the room. No one moved. No one breathed.

Vera stared hard at Charles. “Such as?”

Rose saw Delia and Charles exchange a glance.

“We can talk about it more after the tests are concluded,” Charles said.

“What else could it be?” Vera said, in between hiccups. “What else? Do I have Old Timer’s Disease? I do, don’t I?”

Charles looked confused. “Old Timer’s?”

“She means Alzheimer’s,” Rose whispered.

Distress clouded Vera’s face. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That I’m losing my mind!” She started to wail.

Charles hesitated, but the look on Vera’s troubled face couldn’t be ignored. “No. I doubt it would be Alzheimer’s. It’s more likely to be operable—maybe a brain tumor—”

Those two words were like the crack of doom.

Vera wailed louder.

Jimmy Fisher must have gone right to work. A day later, Bethany received a written invitation from the Sisters’ House, asking if she would come for tea to discuss the opportunity to work for them. There was a postscript at the bottom of the letter: “Do you have a steady eye and good aim? Do you like rituals?”

Bethany marched right over to Galen’s barn and found Jimmy in the workshop, repairing a harness buckle. She waved the letter at him. “Are these sisters truly sane? Am I safe going over there?”

Jimmy roared with laughter and said yes, the sisters were both safe and sane. A little eccentric, perhaps. “You should go. If nothing else, you’ll have a great story to tell.”

None of that prepared Bethany for what actually happened. The Sisters’ House was two-story, framed and old, in need of fresh paint, surrounded close in by a small picket fence that was also in need of paint. The grass in the yard needed mowing as well—or would as soon as the weather warmed up.

The sisters met her at the door, five of them lined up in a row, all in their eighties. You never saw such an elderly group of ladies, and Bethany thought Mammi Vera, at sixtysomething, was ancient. Very prim and ladylike, with white hair piled like swirls of whipped cream at the back of their heads, tucked under their gossamer prayer caps.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Ella, the eldest, said. “Right on time . . .” She spoke in a quiet, intelligent voice, but right away Bethany noticed she had the habit of dropping off her words in midsentence, as if she had forgotten what she was going to say.

“She always claims she knows when a person is coming,”
Ada, the second eldest, whispered to Bethany. “She claims she knows everything.”

Lena, the third eldest, led Bethany into the living room. Bethany felt stunned by the condition of the room. It was filled with furniture, stacks of books, overflowing boxes. Every nook and cranny was steeped with some kind of clutter: newspapers, books, boxes filled with quilting material, baskets full of yarn, junk mail, bills. Even the walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with old calendars. Most Plain families had . . . well, plain homes. A rug, some perfunctory furniture, maybe a calendar or two on the wall. Sometimes a picture of a bird. But walls were mostly bare. This home looked like nothing Bethany had ever seen.

One of the sisters—Sylvia, the youngest—caught the look of shock on her face. “It might seem a wee bit disorganized, but we know where everything is.”

Ella bobbed her head. “We do.”

“We’re facing a bit of a sticky wicket, you see,” Sylvia said. “We’re supposed to have church here and some of our relatives said they would help us clean things out. But we don’t want them to help. Last time they helped, we couldn’t find anything for weeks.”

“Months,” said another sister.

“Years,” said another.

Bethany exhaled. “When are you scheduled to host church?”

The sisters looked at each other. “Whenever we can get the house tidied up, I suppose,” Sylvia said. “Deacon Abraham said we didn’t have to rush. But he’d like us to take a turn. It’s only fair, he said.”

“That’s true,” Ella said. “It’s only fair.”

Bethany looked around. Tidied up? That was an understatement. This house was buried in clutter. It was drowning.

They emptied stacks of old
Budget
newspapers off the sofa and sat down to tea—excellent tea, made by Fannie, the fourth eldest, which Bethany thought even the oh-so-proper Inn at Eagle Hill guest would approve of.

“Can you make a good cup of tea?” Fannie asked. “We don’t drink coffee. But we do love our tea. Real steeped tea. Not the cotton ball type.”

“As a matter of fact, I can.” Delia Stoltz had shown Bethany how to make tea one rainy morning after she had brought down the breakfast tray. At the time, Bethany listened politely to the tea steeping lesson, but inside, she was thinking, my lands, Delia Stoltz was a grand lady. Now, she was grateful.

“And have a prune,” one of the sisters said, thrusting a bowl of wrinkled prunes at Bethany.

Another sister nudged her. “Never pass up a chance at a prune.”

Bethany swallowed hard.

Then things took an odd turn. Or rather, even more odd. The sisters sat along the sofa, in order of their age, and peppered Bethany with questions, one after the other, right down the line. “Do you have fine penmanship? Are you trustworthy? Are you punctual? Do you get nervous if you’re confined in small, dark places? Can you keep a secret?” Bethany’s throat went bone dry. These ladies might be certifiably crazy. She barely put her teacup down when Ella said, “Sisters, I believe she will do . . .” Then her voice trailed off, distracted by something in her head.

Ada peered at Bethany over her spectacles and picked up where Ella left off. “I believe you’re right, Sister.” The three
other sisters nodded in agreement, capstrings bouncing up and down, along with their chins.

Bethany was still very unsure of what exactly they were proposing.

Sylvia, the youngest, was the only one who seemed to sense Bethany’s confusion. “We’d like to offer you the job. Of course, take all the time you need to make your decision. A minute. Two minutes. Whatever you need.”

While Bethany’s head went round in perfect circles, the sisters assumed her silence meant acquiescence. As they walked her to the door, she was told to return in a week’s time—because it would take them that long to get used to the idea of having someone in their employ—to wear work clothes, and to not be late.

18

W
hy her? Why did bad things always happen to her? Vera lay in bed early on Sunday morning, startled by the sound of a door shutting. That would be Rose, slipping off to watch the sunrise. It was a habit of Rose’s and an annoying one, considering Vera’s bedroom happened to be on the first floor.

Last night, after the guest lady and her doctor husband finally left, Rose pointed out that Vera and the guest happened to be about the same age. “Well, I might look like her if I didn’t have the troubles I do,” Vera snapped back.

Her mind drifted back to her troubles. The doctor’s words. Why did doctors always circle-talk and cross-talk and use hundred-dollar words? Why didn’t he just come out and say she was dying?

Because she was. She knew she was. She had been old since she was thirty-five, when her dear husband died after a fall off the roof. She’d been teetering at death’s doorstep since she was forty-seven, when her first daughter-in-law abandoned dear Dean and their two babies. Then at fifty, she took a step through the threshold when her son left the Old Order Amish
church to take on a second wife and faced excommunication. She just hadn’t gotten around to the actual dying part yet. When she stood over her Dean’s coffin, she clutched the coffin rim and said, “Mine will be next. I’ll be the next box they shovel the dirt on.”

Deacon Abraham chastised her for saying such a thing. “Only the Lord knows the future,” he said. True, but Vera had a gift for prophesying doom. And she was rarely disappointed.

What was the point of having another medical test? Besides, that test sounded like something out of a nightmare. Imagine getting rolled into a big tin can and have magnets turned on? There was no way in the world she could tolerate something like that. She must have looked like she just found out they were going to drop her in a pot of boiling lard, because the doctor hastened to add the test should only last for ten minutes. Ten minutes too long! She heaved a stretch-to-the-limits sigh.

If Dean were still alive, he would let her pass in peace, dignity intact. The very thought of Dean made her sadder still, if that were possible. Why had God taken Dean, but left her? It wasn’t right for a mother to outlive her child. “Therefore shall his calamity come suddenly, suddenly shall he be broken without remedy,” the proverb read. That was true. She was left broken without a remedy.